I
The theatre, it is frequently remarked, is always in a state of crisis.
Controversy about the place of analytical bibliography in English studies,
not to mention editorial conjectures and refutations, suggests that it has
more in common with the drama than a concern for its texts. Even when
all is well, bibliography, as David Gallup has said, "can hardly be
recommended as an occupation for completely sane people."[1], and for reasons beyond those he
gives.
Quite recently Peter Brook argued in an interview with the late James
Mossman that the theatre is in crisis, not for any of the old and relatively
superficial reasons — because money, or authors, or audiences were
in
short supply — but because it is no longer rooted in shared, common
experience. One does not have to describe how, in many academic
communities, there has been a weakening of 'shared understanding' of the
nature and purposes of the academy. It is a time of disquiet when basic
assumptions are being challenged and it would be surprising, and even
alarming, if fundamental questions were not now being asked about the
nature and practice of textual criticism. The most notable, and the most
sustained, of these critiques is D. F. McKenzie's "Printers of the Mind:
some notes on bibliographical theories and printing-house practices" which
appeared in Studies in Bibliography in 1969, but McKenzie
is
not alone. The editors of the Ohio Browning have questioned the
meanings of 'author' and 'text'; James Thorpe, the author of a distinguished
essay on "The Aesthetics of Textual Criticism," has attacked what he
regards as the scientific pretentions of bibliographers;[2] and of much longer standing,
though
almost unnoticed by bibliographers concerned with later English literature,
George Thomson and George Kane have questioned the very foundation of
the use of stemmatics in editing complex manuscript traditions.
It could be that contemporary uncertainty is akin to those "Revolts,
republics, revolutions" described by Tennyson in The
Princess
as "No graver than a schoolboys' barring-out;" but it is salutary to recall
that The Princess was published only a year before The
Communist Manifesto.
The situation described by McKenzie and implied by the editors of
the Ohio Browning is (if, risking Mr. Thorpe's displeasure, I might make
a comparison with science) not unlike that defined earlier in the decade by
Thomas S. Kuhn and called by him 'paradigm rejection.'[3] Received or normal science, he
argues,
often suppresses fundamental novelties because they are subversive
of its basic commitments. [When scientists] can no longer evade anomalies
that subvert the existing tradition of scientific practice — then begin
the
extraordinary investigations that lead the profession at last to a new set of
commitments, a new basis for the practice of science (pp. 5 and 6).
Thus, one set of traditions — one paradigm — is replaced by
another:
Copernican for Ptolomaic astronomy, Newtonian for Aristotelian dynamics.
This scientific paradigm serves not for replication as does a grammatical
paradigm (so that
amo,
amas,
amat may
be replicated as
laudo,
laudas,
laudat)
but as "an object for further articulation and specification" (23). Thus the
scientific paradigm is open-ended (10) and encourages the solution of
puzzles within the terms of the paradigm. If these puzzles prove insoluble
within the paradigm they become counterinstances which,
when
sufficiently significant, lead to the rejection of the paradigm. Are we
faced in analytical bibliography with sufficiently serious counterinstances
for us to reject our current paradigm?
Kuhn's description of the moment of crisis for the scientist is
instructive:
Because it demands large-scale paradigm destruction and major shifts
in the problems and techniques of normal science, the emergence of new
theories is generally preceded by a period of pronounced professional
insecurity. As one might expect, that insecurity is generated by the
persistent failure of the puzzles of normal science to come out as they
should. Failure of existing rules is the prelude to a search for new ones
(67-8).
If for 'normal science' one reads 'current bibliographic practice' it is
possible to see why it
might be true that we have encountered
in recent months not just a moment of individual or passing uncertainty but
a deeper and more serious crisis. In another respect there seems to be an
analogy between McKenzie's response to what he regards as the inadequacy
of current bibliographic practice and Kuhn's description of the effect of
crisis on some scientists. Dr. McKenzie, it will be remembered, began by
arguing that bibliographers must proceed by the hypothetico-deductive
method. He pointed out, quite rightly, that our understanding of what went
on in the Elizabethan printing house is based on limited evidence and hence
assertions of normality must be tenuous. Then, basing what he said on his
study of printing at Cambridge University Press between 1696 and 1712
and on the work of two eighteenth-century printers, Charles Ackers and
William Bowyer, he considered such problems as
workmen's output, edition sizes, and the relationship of composition to
presswork. He then attacked current theories of compositors' measures,
cast-off copy, skeleton formes, proof correction, and press figures. He
argued that bibliographers ought to show a greater concern than they had
for historical perspective and concluded by suggesting what seemed to some
readers to be what was tantamount to a turning away from analytical
bibliography:
if our basic premise is that bibliography should serve literature or the
criticism of literature, it may be thought to do this best, not by disappearing
into its own minutiae, but by pursuing the study of printing history to the
point where analysis can usefully begin, or by returning — and this
is the
paradox — to the more directly useful, if less sophisticated activity
of
enumerative 'bibliography'.
[4]
This is not dissimilar to the effect of crisis on scientists as Kuhn describes
it:
Though history is unlikely to record their names, some men have
undoubtedly been driven to desert science because of their inability to
tolerate crisis. Like artists, creative scientists must occasionally be able to
live in a world out of joint — elsewhere I have described that
necessity
as "the essential tension" implicit in scientific research. But that rejection
of science in favour of another occupation is, I think, the only sort of
paradigm rejection to which counterinstances by themselves can lead
(78-9).
McKenzie's plea that bibliographers should be more modest in their claims
and his preference for historical studies and enumerative bibliography over
a proliferation of ill-founded theories is acceptable enough, but his article
seems to me to reveal an unease that goes much deeper. It is not surprising
that Robert Donaldson, reviewing what McKenzie had written, should say:
It may be felt that this conclusion in particular [that men and work in
the Elizabethan printing house were
not 'so related as to
produce the most economical work-flow geared to the printing of a single
book'] and the entire article in general have injected so much uncertainty
into the already complicated structures of analytical bibliography that it is
no longer worth the time and concentration necessary to develop
them.
[5]
McKenzie's strictures are salutary but not, I think, quite so
devastating as to lead me to desert bibliography and the practice of editing
because I cannot tolerate this crisis (to adapt Kuhn's words). I should like
to comment on what McKenzie and Thorpe have to say and to discuss some
of the points raised by the editors of the Ohio Browning. I shall try to
suggest what seems to me the proper relationship of bibliography to science
and what part the hypothetico-deductive method can play in textual studies.
I shall endeavour to outline some of the considerations which a modern
editor ought to bear in mind in his use of bibliography in the light of what
may be a shift in the way in which we apprehend our world which could
affect not only bibliography but studies of many kinds and, indeed, creative
literature itself.
